By Richard Hanania

Conversation with Steve Hsu on the Russian-Ukraine crisis, the decline of the West, the Chinese system, embryo selection, and much else.

This week on the CSPI Podcast, I was delighted to talk to Steve Hsu, an entrepreneur and professor of physics at Michigan State University. His blog is called Information Processing, and you should definitely read about his many passions and interests there. I was just on his podcast last week discussing my book.

or the CSPI podcast, I was excited to talk to Steve and thought we would be able to cover a wide range of the things he is interested in. I was mistaken; we started talking about geopolitics and the Chinese system, and that took up about an hour. This portion of the conversation covered issues like current tensions in Eastern Europe and American military power relative to that of China and Russia. We discussed how the state of Russian military technology gives the US less leverage than it thinks it has in the Ukraine crisis. As with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which proved US assumptions about what it was doing in that country to be based in fantasy, a conflict over Ukraine may again expose American delusions.

Moreover, what would a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan look like, and what would the US be able to do in response? What should it do? This part of the conversation was followed by a long discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese system and its differences with the democratic capitalist model, including the former’s reliance on standardized tests and institutions designed to evaluate and promote government officials. Steve has many interesting thoughts on how the rise of China is going to affect the West psychologically, something I have also written and thought quite a bit about.

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